London Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle review: Voluptuous sound and achingly beautiful textures

Not many composers can boast of a village, a museum and an airport all named after them. But Georges Enescu, also a prodigious violinist, has always been regarded as one of his native Romania’s chief cultural exports.

Ironically, his two Romanian Rhapsodies, imbued with the gypsy-style idioms and sonorities deployed by travelling Romani musicians, were written in Paris, in whose bars Enescu doubtless heard such players as he sipped his absinthe. The rhapsodies are really glorified encores but Simon Rattle and the LSO made a case for the first, in A major, delivering it with polished élan.

Debussy’s set of orchestral Images, by contrast, are picture postcards of England, France and Spain. In Gigues the Northumbrian folk tune The Keel Row is omnipresent, occasionally ebullient, mostly mournful, always wrapped in voluptuous sounds. Both here and in the elegiac Rondes de Printemps, written under the shadow of death, Rattle produced achingly beautiful textures.

Shadows occasionally pass across the face of the music in Brahms’s Violin Concerto too and Rattle is always responsive to these moments, for the most part mixing a rich-hued orchestral palette as a backdrop for the accomplished Leonidas Kavakos.

Repeated Tues (020 7638 8891, barbican.org.uk)